There's a new article on developerWorks that provides details and sample code on how to call out to any Java class from the Workplace Designer JavaScript editor. It includes sample code for calling your own classes, the Workplace APIs, and the Domino Java backend classes.

Now you know how to easily extend the Designer environment with your own code. What other types of techniques are you interesting in. We have a few more samples in the works that cover things like client-side JavaScript and showing single documents in panels.

My wife bought me a couple of CDs from CD Baby. She got one of those auto-emails when the CDs shipped that I thought was pretty funny.

"Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves withsterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Thursday, February 9th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!"

You can download a trial version of Workplace Designer 2.6 here. You can run it on Workplace Services Express (WSE) 2.5.x or Workplace Collaboration Services 2.6. If WSE, then you will need to install the Designer runtime code on the server. The whole installation process for Designer is about 15 minutes.

There is also a trial of WSE 2.5.1 posted in the same place. You do need the server in order to see how your code is working.

I discovered, by accident, that hitting Ctrl-Tab moves from window to window within the Notes or Firefox tabbed window environment. Very handy, since I'm always alt-tab-ing from app to app. I don't know how many times I've alt-tabbed from firefox when all I wanted to do was switch tabs from within it.

The folks at Wellesley Information Services, publishers of "The View", have started a new journal, The Sphere, focused on "WebSphere developers, administrators, architects, and managers".

The current issue includes my own article on Workplace Designer (slightly updated from "The View" version for this audience). It looks like there are other in-depth articles on JSF, portal upgrades, WebSphere Everyplace Deployment managed-client apps, and more, at 124 pages.

You can check out a reprint from a past issue here, if you want to inspect the quality of information. I've found The View articles to be well-written and contain deep, practical information from experts in their field. It looks like The Sphere upholds that tradition.

Second in the series on understanding Ajax, Make asynchronous requests with JavaScript and Ajax, is up on developerWorks.This one covers:"Most Web applications use a request/response model that gets an entire HTML page from the server. The result is a back-and-forth that usually involves clicking a button, waiting for the server, clicking another button, and then waiting some more. With Ajax and the XMLHttpRequest object, you can use a request/response model that never leaves users waiting for a server to respond. In this article, Brett McLaughlin shows you how to create XMLHttpRequest instances in a cross-browser way, construct and send requests, and respond to the server."

I've been a Guy Kawasaki fan since the days of The Macintosh Way. He's got some interesting things to say on his blog, now, too.

This one talks about sending effective emails. Most of these are common sense, if you thought about it, and I tend to follow them, myself having been annoyed enough by the inarticulate, unfocused body, THE SHOUT, and the opposite - mister all-lowercase, no punctuation.

A lot of people (I hesitate to say "most people") fail to follow even the most basic email etiquette, like putting a meaningful subject line in the email, like "Hey" or "hi" or absolutely nothing. This last one makes for a series of fun subject lines like "re:re:fwd:re:". Gotta love that!

I don't think I'll be "snipping" any urls any time soon. That sounds like more extra work. At least in Notes, you could potentially hide the long url in a hotspot link, but even that is probably beyond most users.

I especially like the 'Attach files infrequently' suggestion, since I'm always up against my quota limit.

Open Ajax Initiative LaunchedFEBRUARY 01, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - The market for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a technique for developing interactive Web applications, is heating up with the announcement today that several vendors, including IBM, BEA Systems Inc., Borland International Inc., Novell Inc., Oracle Corp. and Red Hat Inc., have formed a collaborative to help push AJAX in the open-source community.

Having some sort of standards cooperation amongst the industry leaders for Ajax is expected to accelerate adoption because it will simply be easier to implement Ajax behaviors using standard libraries, plus it will work across browsers.

IBM's own proposal for Eclipse tools hopes to provide a foundation for the types of things you need to develop Ajax style apps, like a debugger.

If you missed the Lotusphere Opening General Session, we demonstrated a simple way to add Ajax behavior to a simple edit control, by dragging the Typeahead behavior onto the control. Once it's there, the Designer value-add is allowing you to easily calculate the type ahead choices. For example, you could write any JavaScript "formula", i.e. a script, that returned an array of values. In our demo, we used the familiar @dbColumn function to actually lookup values from a Designer View object. As any Domino developer knows, this lets you dynamically fill the type ahead choices (or list box, or whatever), based on what the user had previously entered. We think that we'll make Workplace Designer the easiest way to add Ajax to your app.